Mother Knows Best

The women take control in “Heartless.”

When it comes to young directors who know what to do with Sam Shepard’s chimerical, philosophically complex writing, Ethan Hawke has most of his contemporaries beat. In 2010, Hawke staged a revival of Shepard’s brutal and mystifying 1985 play, “A Lie of the Mind.” Hawke’s intellectually self-assured version of Shepard’s study of sibling rivalry, brutalized women, and errant masculinity—one character can’t remember whether he killed his wife or not—sped up the slack moments and didn’t play into Shepard’s often halfhearted attempts to give his characters naturalistic narrative ends. Instead, Hawke honored the density of the playwright’s language by stylizing the production: filling the set with symbolic objects that the inconsolable characters had bought for their comfort—gewgaws, quilts, ashtrays—but which looked, to the audience, like trash, and bringing a band onstage to play during and between scenes (a reminder of Shepard’s terrific early work, which borrowed from rock and roll both its tight, free forms and its anarchic force). In an interview with PBS in 2010, Hawke said of “A Lie of the Mind,” “Ever since Marlon Brando and Elia Kazan, acting has always been about naturalism. But there’s something about this play that is not naturalistic. There is something about naturalism that is a lie. . . . The play is not a dream, but the play kind of tells you that your life is a dream.”

While watching Daniel Aukin’s staging of Shepard’s new play, “Heartless” (at the Signature Theatre Company), I struggled not to compare his stripped-down approach with Hawke’s grand over-all vision. Of course, the plays are different in a number of respects. Although they’re both ensemble pieces—“A Lie of the Mind” has a bigger cast by half—“Heartless” is dominated not by men but by women. And Shepard is working new linguistic ground here, with a sparse text that’s no less surreal than “A Lie of the Mind” but has more space and silence between its lines. Unlike much of Shepard’s work, “Heartless” isn’t nostalgic for the fantasy of the Old West, where the romance was between men—fathers and sons and brothers. Instead, it tries to dramatize what men imagine women are like when men aren’t watching.

Eugene Lee’s set for “Heartless” doesn’t tell us much about the universe we’re about to enter. The stage floor has been painted black. Two beds sit center stage. Three palm trees line the proscenium. The scene evokes the slick, empty surfaces of nineteen-seventies pornographic films shot in Los Angeles—a cold fantasy space inhabited by pale bodies. And these beds are, indeed, occupied by pale bodies: those of Roscoe (Gary Cole) and Sally (the luminous Julianne Nicholson). We hear a woman cry offstage. Roscoe leaps out of bed. He’s an average-sized guy, who looks younger than his sixty-five years, tough, but a little dull and fearful around the edges. Did Sally hear that sound? She did. Roscoe tells her that when he woke up he thought they were in a motel, because of the windows, but they’re not. They’re in Sally’s mother’s house, in Southern California, where they have stopped off while travelling around America, making a documentary film. But a document of what? Their relationship? (Roscoe, a Cervantes professor, loves chasing windmills; he has left his wife and children for the much younger Sally.) Or is their film about reality itself? That part of the story is still to come. For now, Sally wants to go back to sleep. After a while, Roscoe wanders away to take his howling dog for a walk, and Sally rolls over and tries to drift off.

Beds are an important motif in Shepard’s work. In “Cowboy Mouth” (1971), which Shepard wrote with Patti Smith, his lover at the time, a “fucked-up bed” occupies the middle of the stage. In his “Geography of a Horse Dreamer” (1974), a character is held hostage in his bed, trapped there by gangsters until he can come up with the number of a winning horse. When we first meet May, the unhappy heroine of “Fool for Love” (1983), she’s sitting on the edge of a motel bed, dreaming of fulfillment. Dreams, sex, imprisonment: the beds in Shepard’s works are a stage within a stage, and in “Heartless” the beds are where characters try to make sense of their inchoate thoughts, even as their minds wander in a kind of dream state. Sally’s dreams seem to be about her double. Giving up on sleep, wrapping a sheet around her, she sits up and faces the audience as though she knows who we are. And maybe she does. But that moment of connection passes when she begins to address another young woman, a sister, perhaps, or a fantasy figure, who she believes gave her a heart and who now haunts her:

You should’ve told me it was going to be like this. You could’ve warned me. ’Course how would you know? You were the same as me. Right? Young. Babies, really. What were we then—ten? Eleven? I forget. How could we know what was up ahead? (pause) I’m glad you’re still around, though—some part of you. I’m glad— (stops) You have to stop visiting me, though, in the middle of the night. I can’t— I have to get some sleep. You understand? Some peace.

Peace is in short supply in this house full of female bodies in distress. When Sally stands up and drops her sheet, we see that there is a thick, ragged scar running down her torso. (In a program note, Shepard thanks Sylvia Plath; Sally’s wound and her occasional off-handed humor evoke Plath’s poem “Cut.”) But, despite Nicholson’s mastery over her own comportment—she manages to make her character seem full, yet constricted by hate—we feel less concerned than we should about Sally’s state. The production has already removed us from feeling in any traditional way—which would be fine if the tactic felt indigenous to the director’s or the playwright’s style. “Heartless” relies on the melodramatic form to convey its observations, but it has been bled of melodrama’s passions. Aukin has the actors deliver Shepard’s tonal language in flat voices, with a marked lack of theatricality. Richard Maxwell is the contemporary master of this kind of writing and direction, but Shepard and Aukin aren’t used to it; you get the sense that they’re trying something out with “Heartless”—perhaps it’s a new way of working for both of them, but it doesn’t seem to be a natural one. (Aukin’s direction of the recent hit “4,000 Miles,” by Amy Herzog, wasn’t clamped down in this way.) The staging comes across not as an interpretative vision but as a lack thereof.

When Sally’s sister, Lucy (the terrific Jenny Bacon, in an underwritten role), enters with a tray of syringes and starts to fill them with medication, we’re more interested in the sisters’ physical actions than in their minimalist verbal exchange, which feels familiar:

LUCY: Maybe it was the neighbors, then.

SALLY: What?

LUCY: Screaming, I mean.

SALLY: Screaming neighbors.

LUCY: Domestic dispute or something.

SALLY: I’ve never seen the neighbors, have you?

LUCY: Once.

SALLY: I’ve seen their cars. Their gardeners.

LUCY: Who could’ve been screaming then?

SALLY: This is L.A. People scream all the time.

(Shepard addressed his horror of Los Angeles far more originally in his 1976 anti-Hollywood play, “Angel City.”)

Shepard’s great strengths are his Kerouac-like robustness, even silliness, and his poetic resistance to explaining his artistic impulses, as he digs and digs to get at something that means something to his consciousness—especially his unresolved relationship with his father. But the only character in “Heartless” who seems to have that kind of pull on him is Mable Murphy (brilliantly portrayed by Lois Smith), the wheelchair-bound matriarch to these far-out sisters. Once it becomes clear that Roscoe can’t hack it in this wonderland of wounded women—which includes Mable’s nurse, Elizabeth (the powerful Betty Gilpin), who uses him for sex and nothing more—Mable takes center stage to play Mother, the greatest role in any family drama, to her daughter’s lover. A variation on the Shepard father figure, Mable is squinty-eyed, hard-hearted, and cynical. Could it be that Shepard’s ideal woman is some version of Dad? Or is “Heartless” ultimately about role-playing—Shepard’s attempt to imagine what would happen if women donned stereotypically male attitudes about sex and intimacy, until they merged with the cowboys of his mind? ♦

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